National Technical University of Ukraine “Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute”, Ukraine
I am a third-year student at the National Technical University of Ukraine “Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute” (KPI), Faculty of Applied Mathematics, majoring in Software Engineering. Alongside my studies, I work at Hostmaster Ltd., the organization responsible for operating the .ua country code Top-Level Domain – the national TLD of Ukraine. This role has given me direct practical exposure to DNS operations, domain registry infrastructure, and the technical and administrative aspects of ccTLD management, which directly intersects with the Internet governance topics covered by EuroSSIG.
Report on EuroSSIG 2026
I spent the week of 26 July to 1 August 2026 at the 20th European Summer School on Internet Governance, held at the St. Afra Monastery in Meissen. I got there as a young employee of Hostmaster, the operator of Ukraine’s .UA registry, where I work as a backend developer.
That background shaped what I got out of the week. I came in knowing how registry works from the inside, because I’ve coded some of its parts. I knew almost nothing about who decides the rules that registry runs under. Before Meissen, “governance” was a vague word for me which I skipped over in RFCs.
The technical sessions were the ones I expected to find easy, but they surprised me most. Alena Muravska’s lecture on IP address management gave me the first clear picture I have had of how the RIR system actually functions. Address allocation had always looked like an administrative detail to me. Watching how policy gets made in open community meetings where anyone can push back, showed me it is nothing of the sort. The same is true of the registry work I do every day, and I had never framed it that way. It also turned out that Alena studied at KPI, where I am a student right now, though she came out of chemical engineering and biotechnology rather than anything close to computing. For someone who assumed this field was entered through a narrow technical door, that was worth knowing.
Brian Cimbolic’s session on DNS abuse was my favourite of the week, mostly because he made us do the work. He put real domain names in front of us one at a time and had us vote on each one: suspend it, leave it alone, or pass it to the registrar. The votes split almost every time, and then we had to explain ourselves. Sitting in that room, the hard part was clearly agreeing on what counts as abuse in the first place, and on who has standing to act. A registry’s general counsel is the right person to hear that from.
Dirk Krischenowski’s talk on founding .berlin landed differently for me than it might have for others in the room. There was an attempt to launch .kyiv at one point, and it did not get far. Hearing someone walk through the version that worked, application round to running registry, made the failure look less like proof that the idea was wrong. Most of what he described came down to one person deciding the thing was worth pushing through. That is the part worth bringing home. If a next round opens, I would like us to try again with a better sense of what the process actually demands.
What I valued most was not in the schedule. After the lectures, people kept talking outside, and those conversations were easier and better than anything i said in a session. Something about standing in the courtyard instead of sitting in a lecture hall made it much simpler to say what i actually thought, including the half-formed things. I disagreed with people out there in ways I would not have risked with a microphone in front of me.
The group itself was the other half of the value. Fellows came from very different countries, sectors and career stages, and the mix meant that a question I thought was settled usually was not. I liked the feeling that everyone in the room was genuinely engaged and working toward something common, rather than sitting through a programme.
I left with a much better sense of where my technical work sits in a larger system, and with the intention to keep going. My next step is applying to ICANN NextGen for 2027.